Welcome to 28.8’s

The Man Who Changed Gambling. 1958 - 2014

Welcome to 28point8.com and its history about yours truly and my visions for punters, trainers and media that may last many decades.

1951:

I was born in little country town at the time of Korumburra Victoria, Australia where Dad was a potato farmer and part time harness owner/trainer.

1958:

Dad moved to the city for more work and started training greyhounds with success; I helped Dad out every day with the training of his dogs. When I got my handlers license in mid-teens Dad used to come down to the parade yard and I would tell him who the dangers were to his dog on fitness, it just seemed natural to me.

1971:

I gained my Owners/Trainers greyhound license with immediate success on Metropolitan and Country race tracks. Training in tandem with my father we won nearly 200 races over the forthcoming years with a very small team and this was the grounding for super fitness training experience I gained.

We had out dog’s rock hard and super fit and Dad liked to have a dollar or two on them when they were 100% fit and set in the right race to win.

1987:

Not being a regular thoroughbred race goer, one day in late 1987 I decided to go down to the mounting yard at Sandown race course and view the horse’s parade before the race.

To my astonishment I rated the horses in colour fitness and said the red one will beat the blue horse on fitness, and it did!

This was all new to me and I continued most of the afternoon placing the fitter horses across the line and I asked myself “How fit is a horse?”

That weekend all racing papers for Saturday I highlighted 600 times the word fit, fitter today, fit to win, should be fitter etc, yet there was not quantitative figure on fitness available.

I said to myself, “What if you could put a quantitative figure of fitness on a horse and what would that be worth one day?”

This was the start of my pioneering journey into horse fitness ratings in a percentage.

I started rating horses as Fit, Good, Fair, Ok, Unfit, but then added Fit +, good - and much more continued on this about a year.

1988:

I realized that to have edge that nobody else had yet found, my ratings had to be in a percentage out of 100% with each variation in fitness to represent a margin that a horse may have an advantage over another horses.

To understand the science of fitness, my brother was Australian fitness coach of the Olympic softball team in preparing juniors for future Olympic selection.

Paul had many valuable tips and books for me to read about the science of super fitness, added that to now tens of thousands of observations I was doing at race tracks live.

1996:

I was not happy with my ratings progress and after 9 years of research I threw all my notes out and started again.

The fitness margins had to be only 1% in value per 1 length because many horses cross the line in groups less than 5 lengths.

I realised now through nearly 40 years’ experience in racing that there were four main components why a horse peaks in fitness, and they had to equally increase for a horse to have a chance in lead-up races to 100% Super Fit peak fitness.

1. Fitness Levels:

This is achieved by the everyday training of a horse

2. Strength Factors:

A horse has to have sufficient power & strength factors to finish off a race and win.

3. Hypertrophic Levels

This is muscle on muscle fitness training and allows horses to maintain higher speeds at the end of the race to win.

4. Blood Counts (Oxygen Speed)

When training my greyhounds I used vitamin regularly to increase my dog’s red corpuscles that carry the oxygen to the muscles to sustain a higher speed longer to win more races.

Blood count levels are the most important fitness factors that punters and trainers need to identify.

2004:

As word spread around the race tracks I met many persons in racing and was asked if I would like my own full page fitness editorials in Australia’s No 1 racing paper, The Sportsman.

I black booker many winners for punters because they were in the fitness zone, plus nearly all the Group race winners of that year, some 6 weeks out because they had great balance fitness levels.

2010:

I still was not happy with my fitness ratings and found that I had not allowed enough valuation of a horses power and strength factors. I made major adjustments up to the end of 2013 and now my research into horse fitness is completed, I hope!

The same fitness principals have been tested with success on other codes of racing, harness and greyhounds.

28.8 Scanfit App.:

Software developers are still few and far between with this knowledge in this new cutting edge pioneering technology I am working on.

Soon punters will be able to take a photograph of a horse anywhere, including freezing an image off your computer or television, take photos of all horses and send to scanning @ 1,000 images per second, punters will know how fit every horse is in the upcoming race before all races.

Broadcasting networks can include 28.8 Scanfit software into their cameras to fitness scan horses and advise punters.

This will happen, it is just a matter of time.

I hope you find this interesting and now I have released many horse fitness short videos including How To Rate a Horse’s Blood count (5) and many others.

Fitness is not in any form guides and bookmakers do not frame their prices on fitness, so a massive new edge is out there for 500 million punters.

I own many registered new programing and unique reality shows for fitter horses.

I am here to help every punter and trainer in the world and after 54 years and 100,000 hours of fitness research punters can now know how fit horses are.